BLACK TONGUE by John Groves
While cruising the Caribbean in a luxurious yacht, Princess Callalily and her
formidable lady-in-waiting are taken hostage by pirates.
Transferred to the pirate ship, they are obliged to adapt to its harsh
sea-going conditions.
In the course of the voyage, both parties undergo a sea-change quite foreign to
their natures. The royal couple acclimatise to the rough life of the pirate
ship, while its captain, Black Tongue, is persuaded to give up his disreputable
life and go straight.
Against all the odds, the princess and the pirate fall in love and plan to
marry. But will a reformed pirate be acceptable to the princess’s haughty family?
Can Black Tongue survive shame in the eyes of his crew when they discover his
real name? Will he make the transition successfully?
Both cheeky and tongue-in-cheek, it is a light-hearted tale, full of quirky characters, including a fictitious Royal Family.
John Groves
John Groves was born in London’s East End in 1926.
Thirteen at the outbreak of World War II, he was a survivor of the London
Blitz. As many London schools closed in wartime, he joined the UK Post Office,
embarking on a career in public service at the early age of fourteen.
Serving nearly four years in the Grenadier Guards, he returned to civilian life,
progressing through various Departments of Government, specialising in
information services and publicity across a broad spectrum of the media.
After a short sabbatical, working and studying in Hollywood, he returned to the
Post Office, a qualified PR specialist in films and broadcasting. Liaising with
virtually every news and documentary programme on the air, from Blue Peter to
Panorama, he also became, in the late 1960s and early 70s, Government media
spokesman on national broadcasting policy, much involved in the great new
innovations of colour television, Channel Four, Radio One and local radio.
Accelerated promotion to Deputy Director of Public Relations, Post Office,
rounded off 40 years in public service. He wound up his career as a
professional PR consultant and City correspondent.
His first novel, The Carapace, appeared in 1991, followed by a controversial
book of prose and poetry incorporated in a wide-ranging environmental
philosophy, Naked Heaven, Naked Earth. His first paperback was a slim
anthology, Poetry on Purpose, which appeared in 1994, paving the way, in 1996,
for an anthology of seventy new poems, The Chocolate Sword, in his seventieth
year. The Learning Curve of Love
– ‘100 New Poems for the Millennium’, completed the cycle in 1999. The MCC at Lord’s gave special prominence to his work in their first anthology of cricket verse,
published by Methuen in 2004.
